The “Dirty Dancing” actor, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier this year, will begin shooting his new A&E series “The Beast” in Chicago this summer, the cable network announced Monday.

A&E ordered 13 episodes of the one-hour drama, which stars Swayze, 55, as an unorthodox FBI agent who trains and hazes his new partner (portrayed by Travis Fimmel). It is scheduled to premiere early next year.

“I have searched for quite a long time to find a character that is this multi-layered, unpredictable and downright entertaining, as well as a project this current and cutting-edged,” Swayze said in a statement.

“There are constant twists and turns, because we never know what this `Charles Barker’ is going to do next! Not only is the show driven by plot, but as important, it’s character driven,” Swayze said.

Swayze’s representative, Annett Wolf, confirmed to The Associated Press in early March that he was undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer; meanwhile, his physician Dr. George Fisher issued a hopeful statement, saying Swayze had “a very limited amount of disease” and appeared “to be responding well to treatment.”

Wolf declined comment Tuesday. A&E spokesman Dan Silberman said the network wasn’t commenting beyond its news release announcing the greenlit series and statement from executive Bob DeBitetto, who professed to be “thrilled to have Patrick on board.”

The New York Times reported earlier this week that Swayze will likely continue his treatment during four months of filming in Chicago. In an interview, DeBitetto told the Times that Swayze had benefitted by care including chemotherapy and experimental drugs.

“Obviously we’ve had candid conversations with him and his doctors, and we have a fairly high degree of expectation that Patrick will be good to work a full production schedule,” said DeBitetto, adding, “No one is using words like cured or remission or miracle.”

A consumer alert for the millions who have seen the “Sex and the City” movie: There is no such book as “Love Letters of Great Men,” which Carrie Bradshaw reads while in bed with Mr. Big.

The closest text in the real world apparently is “Love Letters of Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day,” first released in the 1920s and reissued last year by Kessinger Publishing, which specializes in bringing back old works.

Richard Davies, press manager for AbeBooks.com, an online seller that features used titles, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he has received hundreds of queries about the book’s existence.

Enough readers have been directed to the Kessinger anthology, on AbeBooks and elsewhere on the Internet, that it ranked No. 134 on Amazon.com on Tuesday afternoon.

In “Sex and the City,” an early scene shows Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) poring over the imaginary collection, although citing real letters by Beethoven and Napoleon among others. Big (Chris Noth) later takes passages from the book as he expresses his love, by e-mail, to Carrie.

Steve Carell, who plays Maxwell Smart in the upcoming spy comedy “Get Smart,” says he had a scent-sational time kissing co-star Dwayne Johnson, who most might recognize as “The Rock”

“The Rock has softer lips. I guess I could say that,” the 44-year-old actor told AP Television. “He smells like strawberry shortcake. For me, that’s why they call him The Rock. He rocks people’s worlds.”

Johnson countered that he doesn’t smell or taste like strawberry shortcake “strawberry shortcake with liver I think.”

The 36-year-old wrestler-turned-actor said he was gung-ho about planting a kiss on Carell.

“It was just one of those things where I thought well, you know, `What could be the most entertaining and funniest moment that we could think of that would still make sense and still kind of root in reality?'”

“We came up with a great kiss,” said Johnson, who plays Agent 23. “I thought if Jake Gyllenhaal can do it, Will Smith can do it, then I can do it, too. I’m going to own it. I was like, `Give me those lips right now. Right now.'”

Said Carell: “He is such a good guy. We just laughed that whole day. That was a total no-brainer in terms of that scene. There was never one moment of hesitation or awkwardness. He’s game for anything, let me put it that way.”

“Get Smart,” also starring Anne Hathaway as Agent 99, is slated for release June 20.

Diesel, star of “The Pacifier” and “The Chronicles of Riddick,” and his girlfriend, model Paloma Jimenez, welcomed a baby girl in Los Angeles on April 2, his representative, Meredith O’Sullivan, said in an e-mail Friday.

The “Harry Potter” author also spoke about the benefit of failure, recalling the humiliations of her time in poverty before her career took off with her string of novels about a bespectacled boy wizard.

Before the speech, some members of Harvard’s class of 1936 paid tribute to Rowling by carrying brooms during an alumni procession.

President Drew Gilpin Faust also welcomed witches, wizards and Muggles non-magical people in Rowling’s books to the commencement. Faust noted that there was a larger number of young children than normally expected for a Harvard graduation and that she knew she was the just “the warm-up act.”

Rowling, who was given an honorary doctor of letters degree, urged the Harvard grads to use their influence and status to speak out on behalf of the powerless.

“We do not need magic to transform our world,” she said. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; we have the power to imagine better.”

Imagination gives one the ability to empathize with others, she said.

“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation,” Rowling said. “In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity; it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

Rowling described a low point seven years after graduating from college, when she was a poor single mother.

“The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are ever after secure in your ability to survive,” Rowling said. “You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”

She called such knowledge “a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.”

Eva Longoria Parker gets to play dress-up at the Cannes Film Festival and she doesn’t even have to pack her own suitcase.

“My bag is packed when I come because my stylist thinks about every event we have, every interview, every red carpet __ everything is already planned and dresses are fitted, and I just put on what somebody gives me,” the 33-year-old actress told Associated Press Television.

Longoria Parker, who is hitting the red carpet for L’Oreal, is having a Versace moment at Cannes. But when she’s at home with her husband, San Antonio Spurs point guard Tony Parker, she’s hardly a fashion diva.

“I actually put on what’s clean,” she said Thursday. “Usually I’m in sweats or jeans. Tony’s favorite outfit is me in jeans and a T-shirt.”